Christopher VaughnWho hasn't thought about running away, starting fresh, building a new life? A word to the wise: do not take the Christopher Vaughn route to starting over. The Illinois dad is facing life in prison after a jury convicted him of killing his entire family so he could move to Canada with a stripper.

The details of his crime are so brutal I'm not surprised the jury took less than an hour to come back with a guilty verdict. The prosecutors say Vaughn told his wife and three children that they were going on a vacation to a waterpark. Sounds like fun, huh?

Only what Vaughn really had in mind was to get the entire family in the car so they'd be in an enclosed space. He tricked them! Then Christopher Vaughn brutally murdered everyone one by one, first shooting wife Kimberly execution-style, then moving on to Abigayle, 12, Cassandra, 11, and Blake, 8.

And all this so he could hightail it out of the Prairie State for the Canadian wilderness ... with a stripper no less?

Vaughn's conviction comes five years after he annihilated his family, but I can't help noticing that it comes just a week and a half after a dad in Wisconsin tried to do something similar. Armin Wand is accused to setting his house on fire with his wife and kids inside so he could start fresh -- only the wife and one of the kids luckily survived (sadly his sons perished).

You have to wonder what is going through these guys' minds. Are they stupid? Just plain evil?

Let's just do some thinking here. A) Murder is NEVER the answer to any problem. Never. Ever. Never ever ever. Got that? And B) there is a very simple answer to being miserable in your life.

You leave. That's it. No ifs, no ands, no buts.

We have this thing called divorce here in America that works quite well. If a dad really decides he's such a jerk he doesn't want to have anything to do with his kids, he can even do that. Sure, he'll have to pay child support, but we have plenty of deadbeat dads in this country who haven't resorted to killing their kids to discharge the debt.

What do you think is going through the heads of these guys who murder their families?